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Friday, October 31, 1997

National Public Radio, Used With Permission of Terry Gross
October 31st, 1997

Terry Gross: That's Burt Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg in a scene from "Boogie Nights," a new movie about a group of people who make porn films. Reynolds plays a director who's slightly more ambitious than the average X-rated director. He aspires to make movies that people will watch for the story as well as the sex.

Mark Wahlberg plays the well-endowed teenager who, with the help of the director, becomes one of the biggest stars of adult films.

Boogie Nights takes place from 1977 to '84 and chronicles how the business was turned upside-down by cocaine and video. Boogie Nights shared the Toronto Film Festival's top award with "L.A. Confidential." My guest is the screenwriter and director of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson. Although he's only 27, this is his second feature film. His first, "Hard Eight," was set in the world of casino gambling.

Paul Thomas Anderson grew up in California's San Fernando Valley with a father well-known for his on-screen appearances. No, not THAT kind of on-screen work. Paul's dad was Ernie Anderson, Cleveland's most beloved horror movie host. As a TV personality, Anderson was the first guy on the block to have a VCR, which allowed the young Paul to immerse himself in movies, pornographic and otherwise. By the age of 22, Paul's love affair with film took him to the Sundance Film Festival with his short film, Cigarettes and Coffee. He was then invited to join the Sundance Filmmaker's Workshop where he developed his first feature, Sydney AKA Hard Eight starring Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly and Gwyneth Paltrow. Now, at 27, his second feature, Boogie Nights has left Anderson Tarantino-hot and well on his way to a long, successful directing career. Rough Cut's David Poland caught up with Anderson in Los Angeles, a week before Boogie Nights premiered at the New York Film Festival.

>> You were 26 years old when you shot this film. How could you know about the sexy '70s?
I was 7 when the movie begins and 14 when the movie ends. Maybe it is a twisted sort of version of my childhood. Because I grew up in the valley. And I had brothers and sisters who were going through this stuff. It wasn't like I said, "I want to make a movie set in the '70s and we'll use all this cool music." It was just icing on the cake. Moving into the early '80s was kind of, pick your headband and I'll have the Capezios.

Thursday, October 30, 1997

Producer, director and screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson was all of 7 years old in 1977, a vintage year for the porn film troupe whose '70s adventures and '80s misadventures he chronicles in Boogie Nights.

Yet Anderson says he has firsthand memories of the particular gestalt of the era in California's San Fernando Valley, where he grew up, where the film is set and where the porn industry still thrives.

"I remember how things looked," Anderson says by phone from Los Angeles. "And I can remember at 10 or 11 knowing how porno films looked. My dad was one of the first guys on the block to have a VCR."

Charlie Rose: At age 17, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson made a mock documentary about the life of a porn film star. Ten years and $15 million later, Anderson's project has become Boogie Nights.

CR: Boogie Nights is being compared to films by Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Quentin Tarantino, and was called "the most seductive cautionary tale ever made" by the New Yorker. Joining me now, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, and I am pleased to have him here to talk about this film and the extraordinary attention being devoted to an independent film. Welcome.

At the '97 New York Film Festival press conference for his new film Boogie Nights, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson commented on the 157 minute length of the film: "You're paying more, you should get more.", and the now notorious "dick shot" at the end of the film: "I wasn't going to subject you to 157 minutes without showing it to you." Needless to say, Anderson doesn't take himself too seriously, but his film is a serious look at the porn industry in America, bridging the late 70's and early 80's and is a study in the rise and fall of an extended "family" of actors and their poppa figure, director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds).

About as polished and accomplished as a second film by a 27-year old can be, Boogie Nights features standout performances by Mark Wahlberg, Philip Seymour Hoffman and an Oscar caliber turn by Burt Reynolds, and it marks Wahlberg and helmer Anderson as serious talents to watch. Several days later we got together at his hotel suite in New York to further delve into the world of Boogie Nights.

>> It's a pretty big jump from Sundance to the New York Film Festival (NYFF) with your second feature, isn't it?

Monday, October 27, 1997

With a single small film under his belt, little seen but highly regarded Hard Eight writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson wants to paint on a broader canvas. Which brings us to Boogie Nights, co-winner of the Critics' Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, a film that sprawls across almost a decade in the life of the L.A. porn industry from the late 70s to the mid-80s.

Anderson is all of 27, so there is no autobiographical element in this film.

In a room at the Sheraton Centre during the film festival, he says, "I'm from the Valley, which may explain a few things." Well, a few -- the San Fernando Valley, over the mountains from L.A., is home to the porn industry.

Sunday, October 26, 1997

How the stars and director of Boogie Nights created an audacious epic about the world of '70s porn

"You can't say it's not about porn, " insists writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson of his new movie Boogie Nights, an ambitious tale set in the late-'70s/early - '80s world of hardcore porn. And he's right, but it seems reductive to say the movie is just about porn. Sure, there's sex, and naturally, since it's the '70's, there are drugs, and, again, since its the '70s, there are synthetic fibres and disco and ELO; and there are the timeless topics the movie tackles, such as family, community, losing your mind, getting it up, not getting it up, and a lot more. Boogie Nights is a film about the '70s that could have been made in the '70s, an era of exuberant Hollywood risk taking. It will have funny stuff, gross stuff, tragic stuff. None of which is conveyed by the phrase "about porn."

So why did the 26-year-old Anderson choose this milieu? It's hard to get a fix on that. You can tell a lot about a man by where he drinks; for a few pint with his Boogie Nights lead, Mark Wahlberg, Anderson picks a place on Third Street in LA called St Nicks. The atmosphere here can be best described as Bukowski-lite: kind of seedy but with little actual menace. Hell, it's just around the corner from the Beverly Center Mall. And in a near-by booth, in a blur of cell phones and ponytails and loud orders to the bar, what appears to be an informal pitch meeting is taking place. This depresses Anderson. "God, I should never have left Studio City, " he says, referring to the place where he grew up, in relative affluence (his father was one of the top voiceover artists in the business).

With Boogie Nights -- A movie about the porn industry - Paul Thomas Anderson shows off his startling skills as a director

Sometime after the millennium, we'll all know who the great emergent young American filmmaker of the sensation-mongering '90s was. All we can see now are two major candidates: 34-year-old Quentin Tarantino, the brilliant but detestably influential director of "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction"; and 27-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson, whose bold, sweet and extraordinary film "Boogie Nights" opens Friday.

Saturday, October 25, 1997

"Boogie" business: With New Line's "Boogie Nights" having grossed about $150,000 through Thursday night at two theaters in New York in just five days, it's clearly a winner as it widens today to 30 theaters in 18 markets.

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, "Boogie" was produced by Anderson, Lloyd Levin, John Lyons and Joanne Sellar with Lawrence Gordon executive producing. It stars Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore. The film, which New Line is distributing worldwide, cost only $15.5 million to make. It expands again Oct. 24 and goes wide Oct. 31 to about 1,000 more theaters.

"Paul's agent John Lesher (of UTA) called me and said he had this script he thought New Line, in particular, would respond to. He hadn't submitted it anywhere else. He's got pretty good taste, so I read it and just decided from that point that we should do the movie," Michael De Luca, president and chief operating officer of New Line Prods., told me.

Friday, October 24, 1997

LOS ANGELES -- A biker is whizzing down Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. Suddenly there's a screech of brakes, and he makes a sharp U- turn back. He stops at an outdoor cafe and screams at the kid sitting at the table.

"Hey. You Paul Thomas Anderson?"

Anderson is at the cafe table, talking to a reporter. A publicist is beside him and a photographer waits to shoot his picture for one of the many stories that are breaking with Boogie Nights. This is definitely celebrity time for Anderson.

Remember the name: Paul Thomas Anderson. It's not as exotic as Quentin Tarantino. Not as highbrow as Steven Soderbergh. And it is deceptively generic for a director whose provocative work is taking the industry by storm.

Reviews by A-list critics have hailed his film with superlatives and likened his work to that of Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman. In the past two weeks, he's had lunch with Steven Spielberg (``It was like God called'') and met directors Mike Nichols, Francis Ford Coppola, Tim Burton and George Lucas. Scripts are raining on him. And his age, 27, is evoking memories of earlier wunderkinds from Soderbergh (sex, lies and videotape) to Orson Welles.

"It's very flattering,'' Anderson says matter-of-factly. "But what I really want is just to be able to make movies. And without interference."

Thursday, October 23, 1997

TORONTO -- "Boogie Nights," the fabulously energetic film from 27-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson, ends more than 2 1/2 hours after it begins with two dedications.

One goes to Robert Ridgely, the veteran character actor who plays "The Colonel," a distributor of pornographic films. The other dedication is to network TV-voiceover king Ernie Anderson, the icon better known to Cleveland baby boomers as "Ghoulardi" for his memorable 1963-66 stint as Friday-night host of "Shock Theater" on WJW-TV.

"He made me, you know," Paul Thomas Anderson says about the father who died one day before good friend Ridgely last February. "He had a massive influence on me. I think he had a pretty wonderful and twisted sense of humor. He was very cutting-edge in a lot of the Ghoulardi stuff that he did.

Wednesday, October 22, 1997

Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson looks back fondly on the glory days of skinflicks.

Paul Thomas Anderson appreciates porn. He not only watches it, he's studied and thought about it, as demonstrated by his much-acclaimed film Boogie Nights, which explores the many dimensions of porn, as genre, philosophy, business, cultural metaphor and art form.

In person, Anderson is an endearingly regular 27-year-old, lanky white guy, enthusiastically well-versed in movies of all types, visibly tired after attending last night's New York premiere party and doing interviews all day today. His shirttail is sort of untucked and his brownish hair is tousled; he wears glasses, smokes cigarettes, drinks coffee.

Boogie Nights follows the career of porn star Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), from late '70s to early '80s, when the porn industry changed over from film to video. Before video, the porn industry seemed poised to do something new. "I think," says Anderson, "that a new genre could have been born: a sex film with a story and characters. These films existed for a time: Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, Amanda By Night, or any of the early Johnny Wadd [John Holmes' recurring character] films. It was a great concept, a murder mystery and a fuck film, which scene do you want to watch more? Will he solve the case or is he gonna fuck the woman? It's great tension, sex while the bomb is ticking."

Tuesday, October 21, 1997

With his uncombed hair, rumpled attire and dry Beavis laugh, Paul Thomas Anderson could easily pass for just another glib twentysomething. But those who know the director of ''Boogie Nights'' say that beneath the baggy vintage shirts he favors beats the heart of a boyish enthusiast who worships his cast.

''He's so in love with everything you do,'' says Gwyneth Paltrow, who starred in Anderson's first film, ''Hard Eight,'' and would also have been in ''Boogie Nights'' except ''it would have killed my grandfather.''

Anderson credits his late father, Ernie Anderson, for his first tutorials in the cinematic arts. The two watched movies on television together, and the elder Anderson, a one-time horror-show host who switched to the more lucrative specialty of doing voice-overs, explained some of the intricacies of what was made to look easy.

''He taught me to be obsessed with timing,'' says Anderson, who recalled viewing the 1940 classic ''His Girl Friday'' and listening to his dad snap his fingers as Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell delivered their lines. ''It made me pick up on the rhythm of how people speak, how scenes should be cut.''

Monday, October 20, 1997

The hottest young filmmaker in America -- scruffy, lanky Paul Thomas Anderson -- came to Washington recently in need of an aspirin and a nap. His film Boogie Nights had premiered the previous night to a thousand fans at the New York Film Festival, and the party afterward, he says, was "totally insane, like being at a rock concert."

He's earned this hangover. Call it hyperbole or Hollywood hype, but Boogie Nights is an epic of stardom, corruption and disco in the pornographic film industry circa 1980, has produced the greatest buzz since Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction shook up the crime genre three years ago. Critics compare Anderson to Scorsese and Spielberg; admirers whisper "Oscar" into the 27-year-old's ear.

All this for a movie about a guy with 13 inches of talent.

"It's one hundred percent real," Anderson says with a smirk, playfully denying the common knowledge that the film's star, Mark Wahlberg, sports a prosthesis for the film's most revealing scene. "That's why he got the part."

Anderson is no hairy-palmed, maladjusted porn freak, though he admits he must have been a little obsessed to make a 2 1/2-hour movie on the subject. However, like many males, he was once a hormonally energized teenager who liked to watch other people having sex on screen.

"Porn was endlessly fascinating to me," Anderson says. "Part of it was really sad and pathetic, but part of it was really funny. There's certainly a camp element to it."

American movie Director Paul Thomas Anderson is just 27-years-old. His reputation is one of frankness and no bullshit and he's celebrating the success of his nostalgic porn flick, Boogie Nights which has revitalized Burt Reynolds acting career and put the former Calvin Klein icon and hip hop name Mark Wahlberg back on everyone's lips. But as David Bradley discovers, this brash and funky wunderkind prefers to keep certain matters tucked snuggly beneath the rim of his hat.

It's probably too simple a question really, but one that's just aching to be asked: Did Paul Thomas Anderson, writer/director of Boogie Nights, do plenty of research for the porno saga? The answer: "Sure, man of course. I had to get a feel for it, so me and the cast and crew screened a lot of porno movies during the production shoot, while I've personally been watching them for ages now, you know." So you're a fan then? "Naturally. As a kid, I used to watch them from two different perspective's: one, as the drooling, pubescent kid who breathed heavily, and also on a more serious, scholarly level, carefully noting the styles, the trends, the overall artistry of it all."

When I ask if this is as much hot air as it sounds, Anderson laughs and jokes, "of course. I watched them for a fucking thrill. So did you. So did everyone. Anyone else is a liar."

Paul Thomas Anderson, director and writer of Boogie Nights, sat in the lounge at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Washington, D.C., dressed in a 70s style shirt. Before we had a chance to speak, we heard a loud humming sound coming from somewhere in the distance.

"What is that noise? A vibrator?" were the first words out of Anderson's mouth. I knew from the start that this would be an interesting interview. Along for the ride was a reporter from The Hatchet, George Washington University's student newspaper.

Skyler Miller: What was your inspiration for writing this film?

Paul Thomas Anderson: There was a couple of different things. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, which is where 90 percent of all pornos are made. You know, its really the capital of porn. So, it was always sort of surrounding me in a peripheral way. And it was just sort of a fascination with ... pornography. Probably on a filmmaking level just it was really liking the concept of it as a genre and always wishing it were better. There was a camp aspect that certainly is there, but there's also a really sort of sad and depressing element that's there.

Sunday, October 19, 1997

To most people, the words "porno film" conjure up the worst of American society: sleaze, exploitation, filth. "Boogie Nights" director Paul Thomas Anderson understands that natural association. But he doesn't think it has to be that way.

"Most people feel a weird embarrassment about watching porno -- they're shamed by it -- because it's so poorly done," the wiry 27-year-old says. "Most of it is crap, and you wouldn't bring it up in conversation with a group of smart people. It's like admitting you actually went to see `Con Air' and liked it.

"But if there were great porno movies being made, it might be a different situation. You could say, `Yeah, I'm renting this, and there's (sex) in it, but I'm not embarrassed by that, because there is also great storytelling, and it's good.' "

Anderson's understanding of the potential of adult films -- and his genuine lament of the state of the genre -- fuels "Boogie Nights." The highly anticipated film, which opens Friday, is a sprawling, multicharacter, 2 1/2 -hour epic.

Saturday, October 18, 1997

With "Boogie Nights," the marketing department at New Line Cinema faces a daunting challenge: selling mainstream America on the story of a teen-ager with a gift in his pocket so special it makes adult-film producers happy to see him.

It's a Boy-Meets-Pornographer tale woven with sex, nudity, drugs, violence and one very large prosthetic device -- not exactly the elements of a feel-good hit. No space aliens, no dinosaurs, no president in jeopardy. Featuring Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore, it also has no
"bankable" celebrities.

And to make New Line's job even, ahem, more difficult, a decision was made with the promotional campaign to downplay the film's sexual context. Indeed, the "P" word -- pornography -- has been all but banned from the studio's vocabulary.

"Our strategy is that this film is an important film to see and not a pornographic film," says Mitchell Goldman, New Line's president of marketing and distribution. "It's not about that. (Pornography) is only the backdrop. We're not playing that card."

Sometimes a great notion can lead to really awful revivals, or at least encourage ones that already exist. For instance, there is a movie called Boogie Nights opening on Friday. It's written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who made a name for himself with a quietly ambitious portrait of a gambler called Sydney, which is fine.

For an encore, Anderson decided to investigate the soft-porn industry that flourished in the '70s. He enlisted some decent actors to portray the "family" of film folks who made the dirty pictures in and around L.A. during the '70s and '80s.

In the feature, Mark Wahlberg is Dirk Diggler, Julianne Moore is Amber Waves, Heather Graham portrays Rollergirl and John C. Reilly is Reed Rothchild. Don Cheadle is Buck Swope, and for fun Anderson cast Burt Reynolds to play the director of the corny sex-capade flicks.

Friday, October 17, 1997

Anderson recalls seeing film crews setting up to shoot a dirty movie at one of the houses on his block. When he grew up (he's still only 27), he went on a grim porn quest, renting X-rated movies in hopes of spotting his neighborhood on tape.

He never found it, but he became increasingly interesting in the behind-the scenes aspect of the porn business, which struck him as a warped, pathetic and altogether fascinating business.

"My fascination with porno is that, in a twisted way, it can be incredibly funny one moment and incredibly sad the next. That feeling is something I wanted to capture,'' said Anderson, who visited some porn sets to get a feeling for the scene. ``I did just enough research to verify that what I thought was the truth was in fact the truth. My assumption turned out to be on the money, although the business was sadder than I thought.''

His Boogie Nights is a 1970s period piece about the heyday of porn - when the movies were still shot on film (today it's grainy video), when porno directors had pretensions of making art, or at least artful smut.

The movie's provocative subject (remember the hullabaloo surrounding The People vs. Larry Flynt?) and Anderson's eye-catching technique have made him and his movie a sensation this season.

His work has drawn obvious comparisons to Altman and Scorsese, although the structure and tone of the movie have similarities to Ed Wood, Tim Burton's biography of a man purported to be the worst filmmaker of all time.

Anderson acknowledges the resemblance.

"I think both movies admire people who have the desire to do good work, and who make the effort. Whether the work is good or not is ultimately not important. We are charmed by and in love with the fact that they want to try,'' said Anderson, whose Boogie Nights is the story of a director (Burt Reynolds) and star (Mark Wahlberg) trying to make Hollywood-style movies with pornographic content.

"A hack is a damn hack,'' Anderson said, ``but a filmmaker who has bad taste but is trying his damnedest is to be admired.''

Anderson, at age 27, is trying his damnedest. And succeeding, by most accounts. Boogie Nights is earning high praise, and Anderson may soon surpass Quentin Tarantino as the hottest young director in Hollywood, if he hasn't already.

Anderson does tend to stand out among other Generation X directors, whose work is often genre-bound, self-referential and small in scope. His ``Boogie Nights'' is a sprawling, epic account of American culture, spanning the '70s and '80s, and crossing several generations.

"A lot of people of my generation have been beaten down, maybe by low expectations, into not taking risks. There's so much negativity that ambition seems to be like a bad word. I want to push myself, to experiment. I want my work to have an audaciousness.''

That includes wading into the porno pool at the same time Milos Forman was being attacked for making ``The People vs. Larry Flynt,'' criticized by feminists for being soft on pornographers.

"We were editing when that controversy came to a head. All I'm going to say is that I pinned Gloria Steinem's article to the editing board. I loved it,'' he said. ``I don't think, given the content of my movie, that we're going to get the same kind of flak.''

Probably not. Anderson gives the characters in ``Boogie Nights'' a full measure of humanity while managing to make the exploitative nature of the industry apparent.

And for a movie about sex, it's not very sexy. The sex scenes are more clinical than titillating (part of Anderson's point), and the movie's ``R'' rating stems more from violence than sex.

"I'm not really interested in how pornography fits into some universal moral framework. I wanted to explore the society that this little culture creates for itself. And that's about all I'm going to say about it'' he said.

"There's nothing worse than listening to a filmmaker tell you about his movie, and you're like, 'Hey jackass, why pay $7.95 to see it?' ''

Sunday, October 12, 1997

Before you rush out to see "Boogie Nights," Paul Thomas Anderson's epic about the pornography industry, there's something you should know: This is not a pornographic film, nor is it a film about pornography. It's a film about the people in the pornography industry, and, as such, it's more apt to move you than to turn you on. It's also apt to make you laugh.

Conceived by Anderson when he was 17 and under the sway of "This Is Spinal Tap," the scathing parody of the rock 'n' roll world released in 1984, "Boogie Nights" is set in the San Fernando Valley in the late '70s when, unbeknown to most of us, the porn industry experienced something akin to a golden period. Director-writer Anderson has a keen eye for both the surreality of making a living by having sex on film and the bad taste that pervaded the disco scene, and his film is as hilarious as it is distressing.

"Boogie Nights," made for $15 million and due out Friday from New Line, features an ensemble cast that includes Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, Heather Graham, Don Cheadle and John C. Reilly. Also starring are Burt Reynolds, whose performance is being touted as his most accomplished in years; Alfred Molina, who does a memorable turn as a crazed drug dealer; and Mark Wahlberg, whose work should bring an end to any snickering about Marky Mark, the rapper and underwear model.

Friday, October 10, 1997

Chicago, October 1997 - Paul Thomas Anderson has made one of the best films of 1997, and at age twenty-seven is getting the kind of attention no young director has had since Quentin Tarantino erupted. His Boogie Nights, which follows a cast of colorful characters through six eventful years in the adult film industry, is the year's best-reviewed film - a hit at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals.

Although the film's subject matter is touchy, Boogie Nights is not a sex film; porno supplies the backdrop to a traditionally structured Hollywood story about an unknown kid (Mark Wahlberg) who is discovered by a director (Burt Reynolds), encouraged by an older actress (Julianne Moore), and becomes a star - until his ego and drugs bring everything crashing down.

Wednesday, October 01, 1997

Paul Thomas Anderson wasn't even born when the 1970s began. Yet he's written and directed a 1970s epic about the California porn industry, "Boogie Nights," that is drawn partly from his own experiences growing up in the San Fernando Valley.

"I have strong and distinctive memories of the Valley, from my pre-adolescence and adolescence," said the 27-year-old filmmaker by phone from New York, where the picture played the New York Film Festival. It opens today at the Neptune and Lewis & Clark theaters and moves into 2,000 theaters Oct. 31.

"The Van Nuys industrial section had large warehouses, with people walking in and out of them who were not there to pour concrete," he said.

"I remember I was about 10 or 11, when across the street from my grandmother's house appeared this van and lights, with a lot of shady-looking people hanging around." He even recalls someone saying "They're shooting a porno movie over there."

It's a movie we saw. It's a movie you're going to want to see. It's a movie that made us want to talk to the director. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is twenty-seven, and Boogie Nights, a truly awesome piece of moviemaking starring Burt Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, and Heather Graham, is his second feature. (The first was the indie Hard Eight) Set in the porn industry of the late seventies, this is a movie that even the Motion Picture Association of America can't help loving. "When I first started talking to them, they said, `No, no, no, we want it to be an NC-17 The rating has been ruined for us with Showgirls out there in that Showgirls way. This would really help us,'" says Anderson, who has, as he contracted to do, delivered an R. "I actually called Oliver Stone, thinking, Here's someone who's been through this and can maybe give me some advice. But it was kind of hard getting advice out of him, because all he wanted to talk about was the hypocrisy of America. Actually, he did end up calming down and being helpful."